Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  As well as being beautiful and lying, Master Hendrick’s feet were restless and strong, with no corns or calluses or other deformity. They were very long and slightly wider at the toes than at the heel and his second toe extended further than his big toe and they all had nails with big moons like polished ivory. They were not feet that looked as if they had tramped through bush and savanna, mountains and desert, rivers and jungle, wilderness and the wild forests of the Cape. His feet seemed to have eyes, which stared at my shape under my loose-fitting smock. They joined the eyes in his head, which never took themselves off me. I heard them blinking, blinking as they contemplated the starched white span of cotton that covered my hips.

  Master Hendrick was seven years younger than his brother, but the spitting image of him. He was above average height like him, with broad shoulders, hands that looked exactly like his feet, and a complexion so darkened by the sun and the outdoors it was almost my color. He had a big nose and thin lips and the same fiery wild hair as his brother with tufts of it all over his forearms and chest. His eyes were the same winter-sky gray as his brother’s. When he emerged from the bush, he dressed like a gentleman in a soft kid duster to the ground and linen shirts, silk vests and silk stockings. But in the bush he wore cutoff sailor pantaloons stuck into heavy riding boots, rough slave-cloth shirts and a wide felt hat with a cock feather. He was so strong—I had seen him strangle a wildcat with one hand. He wrestled cattle, broke wild horses, hunted lions and rhinoceros. He was never without a pistol, a hunting knife or a cowhide whip. He was famous for using all three exceedingly well. He boasted that he and his brother had Khoekhoe ancestors and I believed him. This made me feel safe with him. And it made him seem almost human to me, for a Khoekxa !gaesasiba ose . . . a white man.

  Master Hendrick roamed the Khoekhoe lands like one of us, his restless feet never still, his caravans and wagons, his hunting parties and bearers crisscrossing the landscape searching for that one stroke of luck, that one chance that would bring him the fame and fortune he believed he so fully deserved. He thought, like me, that the world owed him more than the life he had, and he often, unlike me, complained about it. His brother would only laugh and rebuke him for not being grateful to God for what he did have. Mistress Alya would simply shake her head in disgust.

  I was now twenty. I had been in service at the Caesar farm for almost four years. One day, Mistress Alya surprised me in my bath.

  —What are you doing bathing in the middle of the day? she said.

  —It’s my rest hour, I replied, rising . . . I . . .

  —What’s that? she cried. She was staring at my sex in horror. I had forgotten to hide myself.

  —My apron, ma’am.

  —Your what?

  —My apron . . .

  —It’s . . . obscene . . . horrible. Cover yourself!

  I pulled up my smock from the floor and held it against me.

  —Don’t you ever let anyone see you again or that filthy appendix . . .

  —But, I protested, a Khoekhoe girl must submit to this . . . arrangement. Otherwise I would find no husband!

  —I have heard of the Abyssinians and the Egyptians cutting girls, but never the contrary . . . said the mistress.

  —I wouldn’t know, ma’am. But I knew the Yousha tribe and the Fula and the Sarahuli excised part of their womenfolk’s sex, then sewed them up so that it took ten minutes to urinate and ten days to complete their menses, “the sewn women,” they were called. But I would never repeat these secrets to Mistress Alya, even though female circumcision was considered clean . . . I remained silent.

  —You know what I’m talking about, you filthy girl. You get your clothes back on and get back to work. The sight of you is so repugnant, I cannot fathom how you can live . . . Vuile bruiden . . . Ribaude!

  She cast one more horrified look at me, but I had hidden behind my discarded frock. Unbidden tears rolled down my cheeks, glistening like the rest of my wet body. My mouth trembled with pain and my heart pounded with agony. I was weeping openly now, in huge deep sobs I could no longer control. I crossed my legs to hide my femaleness even from myself, my arms hanging limply at my sides, my mouth opening in the grief of an O. I sank down hoping the water would not only cover my nakedness but swallow up my life as well.

  A few days later, Master Hendrick arrived from Cape Town driving a newly purchased herd of shorthorns. That night, he performed his magic tricks for the family, making everyone laugh. He was famous among Cape society for his magic, some of which he claimed to have learned from the rainmakers. To me, he was a rainmaker, full of omens and power. His sleights of hand were clever and the company laughed and clapped. Even the children were allowed to stay up to watch, and little Clare sat on my lap, her legs pumping, screaming with delight. I pressed her closer to me.

  After I had put the children to bed, I brought out the basins for the footbaths. As I knelt before Master Hendrick’s, I could feel his eyes on me, as always, and hear his pale eyelashes blinking. I said nothing, bending low over the restless feet.

  —I hope you will be happy with my brother, Saartjie, we shall miss you. Certainly the children who love you so will miss you, but Hendrick has made us a handsome offer for your services.

  I looked up breathless and confused. An offer? But I was not a slave to be bought and sold! I won’t go, I decided stubbornly, my head down.

  —I will pay you two shillings instead of one . . .

  I couldn’t hide my surprise. I turned to Mistress Alya. She knew how much I loved the children. She knew if she sold me, she was also selling me to Master Hendrick as a concubine. She had done it as casually as she would call a dogcatcher to round up a stray dog. She, the great clean Calvinist Christian! I had served her faithfully. I was her favorite servant, she had said. Surely she wasn’t going to send me away, the orphan she had sworn to shelter. Surely she wasn’t giving me body and soul to Master Hendrick! I was her daughter, she had said.

  —Once you’re finished with my feet, Saartjie, Master Hendrick said lazily, you’re to go to your room and pack up your things. We’re leaving early tomorrow; I’ll come and fetch your bundle.

  I was still folding my clothes when the door to my cabin in back of the kitchen opened and Master Hendrick entered.

  —I love you, Saartjie. Been eyeing you, I have. Seems you’ve got something under your skirts that’s a wonder to see . . . a phenomenon . . .

  In my mind I heard the rainmaker’s words: There is no medicine against a world not made up of human beings.

  Before I could reach the door, he was upon me. He caught both my wrists and held them with one iron fist. He took a cord from his pocket and bound them together while I kicked and screamed. Then he threw me on the bed and attached me to the bedposts. The children must have heard my screams. Everyone must have heard them. He took out a linen handkerchief I had ironed for him that morning and gagged me. Then he sighed deeply and sat down on the one chair in the cabin. He watched me squirm and plead with my eyes.

  —Surprised you, didn’t I? But you’re really not surprised, are you? I saw the way you looked at me, nigger slut. You asked for this. You’ve been asking for this ever since I saw you. Ever since the first day you washed my feet . . . I love you, Saartjie. I swear I do. I’ll be good to you. I’ve been told you Hottentot women have a jewel between your legs that can drive a man insane. Now, let’s see . . .

  Fear coiled inside me. What was he going to do? This man who had two testicles instead of one—What kind of man was this?

  —Good God! What’s this?

  I tried to answer but I was gagged. Roughly, he pulled the handkerchief out of my mouth.

  —My apron, I gasped.

  —The Hottentot apron—I thought it was a legend, a myth like mermaids, he whispered. But you’re real . . .

  When he had finished, he straightened up, contrite, and untied my hands.

  —Saartjie, I’ll never do this again. Never, you have got to believe me. Forgive me. I didn’t realize
. . .

  The sheet had wound around me. I gnawed at the edge of it. Yes, that’s what all white men said: Forgive me because I didn’t realize . . .

  At breakfast, no one would meet my gaze. They had all heard my screams. Master Peter announced my departure to the children, who immediately began to cry and wail and cling to me. Mistress Alya stared stonily ahead, fingering the lace at her neck. My eyes met hers and they spoke volumes. They said, You are a woman like me, with a womb like me, and a child like my dead one. I was your daughter. I trusted you and you betrayed me. But Mistress Alya’s eyes held only indifference, if not a mean satisfaction. She had done her best to keep me pure and clean and scrubbed. But I was polluted. I was filth now. Better to sweep it away, under the rug, out the door. What had I done to deserve this, I thought, except exist?

  There was still another surprise.

  —I’ve changed my mind, said Master Hendrick. You’ll stay here, Saartjie, with Peter. I’ll come and go. Life in the bush is no place for a woman. You’ll be here when I return.

  It was an order, not a statement.

  The children quieted down when they realized I was staying. Clare was sucking her thumb again. Clean linen flapped on the clothesline. Karl and Erasmus played amongst the new washing waiting in the baskets to be hung out. I had already washed the sheet I had been raped in. It now was as white as snow. The rainmaker had been right. I felt it. I would never return to the banks of the Chamtoo River again.

  I now lived in the same house with a new master, but the farm remained. Sometimes the light would dawn so thick that to spit into it was to have your saliva fly back into your face. I walked down to the river every morning to bathe a little before dawn and again at twilight, before the world awoke or after it was asleep. I realized why the Khoekhoe believed themselves the original rulers of the Cape. They had inherited Africa’s light, so pure, so high, so clean, I thought, it must be the original light of creation the Dutch and English Christians worshiped.

  I would wade out into the river, the indigo blue framing me, delineating my form and defining it in harmony with every other color and every other shape. Each day, I was reinvented according to the law of Africa. I rose at dawn and by nine, when I awakened the children, the house and everything in it that I was responsible for was scrubbed, cleaned and perfect.

  Sometimes in the evening, before I bathed, I would walk amongst the cattle, corralled for slaughter or sale, and count horns, Khoekhoe style. Sometimes, I would trot a mile or two, softly pacing my steps, breathing in the thick liquid air by mouthfuls, my nose open and upturned. My hips and backside would not allow me to run, their size and weight acted like a piece of wood against a turning wheel. Yet I traveled lightly and quickly to the same spot in the river, where it widened until you could not see the other shore. There, thousands of pelicans nested, so close together their bodies hid the earth and the earth seemed to undulate of its own accord. There, I would take out my gourd, fill it with river water, spill a little on the ground for the earth spirits and drink, taking little sips of indigo at the same time.

  Sometimes on my way home, I would meet the purple heron, standing in the middle of my path, blocking my passage, demanding her right-of-way. It always frightened me no matter how many times it happened. And I would always dream of the meeting that night in bed. I would lie rigid on my narrow cot, thinking that it was almost four years since I had been expelled from the orphanage and condemned to the Caesar farm. It wouldn’t kill me, I said to myself. But I knew in my heart I had exchanged one coffin for another and that I would never leave the prison of Cape Town. I would never leave the prison of the Caesar farm. I would never escape the slavery which was worse than prison and never ending against which I had no defense. Solitude stole over me like the deep blue of twilight, spreading its sadness.

  5

  Every organized individual forms an entire system of its own, all the parts of which mutually correspond and concur to produce a certain definite purpose by reciprocal reaction, or by combining towards the same end. Hence none of these separate parts can change their forms without a corresponding change in the other parts of the same animal, and consequently, each of those parts taken separately indicates all the other parts to which it has belonged.

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals

  on the Surface of the Globe

  April 1809. I first heard of the Hottentot from her master, whom I met in a tavern in Cape Town the night I disembarked from the HMS Mercury . His name was Hendrick Caesar, a fact I didn’t learn until the next morning.

  I had ended up as his drinking partner at the Elephant Horn Tavern and I had told him that while I was ship’s surgeon on the SS Mayfair, Lord Farington, painter to the Court of St. James, had painted three Hottentots that had been imported from the Cape. This enterprise, I explained, had been fascinating to the general public as well as the aristocracy. During the sittings, the cream of high society filed by—Lord Darmouth, Lord Blagam, Lady Banks—not to mention the townfolk; they all came to see a Hottentot!

  —Think what a sensation your servant would make in London, I exclaimed, she would be the first Hottentot to set foot there, I told him.

  —And as, if you say, her shape is so extraordinary as to be absolutely freakish, well my friend, you would make a fortune . . .

  Hendrick Caesar had only smiled into his glass of beer. I knew what he was thinking: that I was one of those new breeds of British gentlemen, white men, who roamed the British Empire searching for fortune and adventure. That I recognized neither moral nor physical limits. Blasé and cruel men like myself were basically bored and found England as small as a prison. We were aristocrats, second or third sons with no inheritance, with funny names, funny uniforms, bred to resist pain, hardship and alcohol. And he was right. Moreover he had no illusions about his own limitations. He was a provincial who had never traveled outside of the Transvaal. He had not been sent back home to school in Holland, but like his brother had been educated by clerics in South Africa. The idea of taking his Hottentot to London and exhibiting her was so outrageous he had burst out laughing.

  —No, I repeated, you can make a fortune with this girl—Saartjie, your little Sarah, as you call her, enough to recoup your cattle and investment losses and send your two sons to Oxford . . .

  —Well, I must say, this is the most amazing conversation . . .

  —Look, I am a ship’s surgeon; I’ve traveled all over Africa and India. I supplement my income by exporting museum specimens from South Africa. I’ve just prepared a shipment which includes a giant elephant tusk, a white rhinoceros, several great ape skulls, a dozen severed trophy heads and a giraffe hide that’s sixteen feet long. Scientific exploration has exploded in the wake of colonial expansion. Scientists must conduct rigorous studies of everything that is new, rare, unusual, exotic, even monstrous in nature. Monsters, according to the great scientist Bacon, are more than a portent or a curiosity. Rather, they are one of the major divisions of nature: one, nature in course, two, nature wrought, and three, nature erring. That is, what is normal, what is artificial and what is monstrous. This last category, monsters, is the bridge between what is natural and what is artificial . . .

  The Boer shook his head. He was having trouble following my discourse, but he was having a good time anyway.

  —Have you ever heard of the Hottentot apron?

  —Why yes, I replied, Levaillant described it in his Travels, but General Jensen claims it isn’t true. Isn’t it a legend?

  —No, he said. It’s no legend. I’ve seen one. Saartjie has one. But how could you exhibit that . . . he asked, shaking his head.

  I sat up straighter. This was really getting interesting . . . Cannibals, Amazons, mermaids, freaks were my métier. It was what I searched for, wandered the globe for, bought and sold and bartered, dying of thirst for that one moment when I possessed the unique, the precious, the scientific. It was what I lived for.

 
—Well, why don’t you come back to the farm with me and see for yourself?

  And as morning broke, we started off for his brother’s farm. The Boer was a taciturn man without much conversation and no imagination and he had not been able to get in a word edgewise since last night. I had not shut my mouth for the past sixteen hours, and he had hung on to every word. The voyages, the miraculous escapes, the explorations, the surgical operations, the wars, the women, the wonders of Scotland. What, I wondered, hadn’t I talked about? I had certainly told him my life’s story: I had been born Alexander William Dunlop of Saint James, Middlesex, Scotland, into an upper-class family of three sons. I had been educated at home, then sent to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. I had joined the army as a surgeon, then resigned to enter the Royal Navy. I had served as a ship’s surgeon, but as I had found the work both brutal and monotonous, I had set out to make the fortune I would never inherit from my father, since everything went to my elder brother, as an adventurer and explorer. From royal and mercantile vessels, my naval assignments darkened into pirate, slaving and smuggling expeditions. My scientific training had given me a taste for exploration and my travels had expanded to China, India, America and Africa. I spoke Dutch and English, Spanish and French, German, Chinese, Xhoe and several other African dialects. I knew I seemed to the Boer not only reckless but totally lacking in moral and physical restraint. Certainly I was courageous, but to what end? It was not that I was an evil or bad man, but rather that I placed no limits on what was acceptable as a means to an end. And my purpose was fame and fortune despite the fact that I seemed to do everything to prevent this happy state of affairs. Certainly I could have married well, with my genteel upbringing and title of doctor. Or I could have become a priest, rising in social standing through Jesus Christ, or I could have become a true hero: a scientific explorer, a privateer in His Majesty’s navy, a functionary in the Home Office, even a foreign office spy in His Majesty’s service. I seemed capable of just about anything; my charm, my smile, my dark good looks would have gotten me far had it not been for some fatal flaw that even I recognized. I was rotten to the core. I am sure the Boer decided to watch his purse strings around me and not to be influenced by my charm. Then, he forgot. In the end, the conversation returned to his Hottentot. I said nothing about a cage, but it was already in my mind . . . the setting, the cruelty, the drama . . .